Jason Blood and Etrigan
The devil walks in form of man. PHYSICAL DETAILS In case you need to know what your character is seeing when they meet either Jason or Etrigan. 'Jason Blood' Jason's a red-haired, fair-skinned man, six feet tall with a reasonably solid and physical build. He looks to be in his late thirties or early forties. He dresses on the conservative (and boring) side of things: trousers and long-sleeved shirts and sweaters in predominantly blacks and browns. His eyes are pale blue; the hair is, as mentioned, red, but with a melodramatic white streak to it. He speaks with a British accent although it's got tinges of a lot of world travel to it (the occasional American twang especially). He's a baritone. His diction is usually terse and clipped, and occasionally outdated phrasings will slip into his conversation. While not usually visible due to clothes, Jason has a number of tattoos. His body temperature runs hotter than human average. He moves with a lot of controlled tension and very rarely relaxes, especially around other people. Something that might not be immediately evident but could be noticed by the astute: Jason's conversational rhythms are slightly off. He'll sometimes take a hair too long to respond to what's being said to him-- not a huge amount of time, just a slight delay as if his attention is elsewhere or as if he's occupied with his own thoughts. Similarly, he will someties smile or frown when external events don't seem to merit it. As a rule though, he doesn't smile much. 'Etrigan' More deets HISTORY 'Before Taxon' (Being a not-at-all-brief biography of Jason Blood, and to a lesser extent Etrigan, comprised of equal parts headcanon and comics canon, go:) Everyone has heard of Merlin, the fabled wizard of Camelot. As the legends have it, Merlin was the product of a union between a devil and a nun, a baby half-demonic and half-human. Whatever plans his infernal sire had for his life were foiled by a man named Blaise-- some say a priest, others say a wizard in his own right-- who baptized the infant Merlin upon his birth, and thus granted him some protection from hell. Blaise raised Merlin and was his first tutor in the arts mystical. This much is known to many, though not all. But there are lesser-known players in the drama. What of Blaise? Who was he? What of his other son? And what of the demon who sired Merlin, and his son? It was a family affair in many ways. Blaise was a jack-of-many-trades. By calling, he was a priest of the early Christian church who'd been ordained in Rome; by inclination, a shyster and womanizer who'd been thrown out of many a town in Europe amid accusations of both adultery and selling false relics. Blaise was a scholar in his fashion-- literacy alone qualified one as educated, in the sixth century-- and collected knowledge of the arcane as well as the sacred in his journeys around Europe. Eventually circumstances, and vengeful husbands, conspired to chase Blaise across the channel to the land that would later be known as England. Blaise quickly realized his education and the smatterings of both science and arcane knowledge he'd picked up gave him incredible advantages in the post-Roman British Isles; he set himself up as either priest or wizard depending on the degree of Christianity being observed by those he met. One of those he met was a woman named Rhona, a red-haired beauty from far to the north, with whom he shared a brief dalliance before she returned to her own people. A year later, Blaise had established himself in the southern downs of England as philosopher/wizard/man-of-God, when riders from the north brought him a nameless babe and the knowledge that the child's mother had perished after bringing him into the world. While the boy was probably not Blaise's only child, it was the first he'd ever had to raise. A love of the tales of his faraway homeland led him to name the boy Iason, after the hero of the Argo; a name decidedly neither Saxon nor Scottish. He found the babe a wet-nurse and supposed he'd figure out fatherhood as he went. But fate had another child in store for him, a bastard son in his own right, but with a more illustrious lineage than Blaise's own son. A nun found herself pregnant by the Devil himself, as she told it; the demon in question was the archfiend Belial. The woman sought out Blaise, trusting to the reputation for piety and wisdom he had perhaps not wholly earned. Still, he took the girl in, and saw her delivered of the child, whom he promptly baptized. The boy was named Myrddin, or, as history would know him, Merlin. The babe was sent back to Wales with his mother, but by the age of three he was from all accounts speaking with birds and prophesying. At a loss, the boy's mother sent him back to Blaise. Rome's wayward charlatan now had two children in his care, one with magical potential such as the world might never see again. He raised the boys together: gifted Merlin, who was quick to grasp Blaise's methods of magic-- as well as manipulation and showmanship-- and the more average Iason, who seemed dull-witted in comparison to his precocious foster-brother. The boys grew. And grew apart, as Blaise favored his adopted prodigy and Iason himself fell behind their studies. Iason turned to things that better suited the height and brawn he'd inherited from his mother's sturdy stock-- hitting things with sticks rather than reading things from books. Time passed, and Merlin achieved greater fame than ever his tutor had-- he was instrumental in raising Arthur to England's throne, and was renowned as the greatest wizard of the land. Iason also found himself at Arthur's court, although in a more mundane role: he was knighted, and married to a suiting lady. By all accounts Iason was happy with his lot in life-- to bear shield and sword in his king's service, and live with his wife. Blaise and Merlin could have the secrets of heaven and earth; it was enough to be a father and husband and loyal knight. But one's own wishes may not matter when one is inextricably entangled in the affairs of kings and wizards, heaven and hell. Like his namesake, Iason would run into problems of the 'sorceress' variety. Morgaine le Fey, in her machinations to usurp Arthur's kingship, sought out a patsy to seduce.... who better than someone close to Merlin and Merlin's tutor? Perhaps magic played a role in Iason's seduction; perhaps merely the weakness of a man to a the charms of a formidable woman. Either way, Iason fell into Morgaine's traps and unknowingly betrayed his king and his oaths. When his treachery was revealed, Arthur stripped Iason of his rank and lands before riding off to the Battle of Camlann and his doom. Camelot was emptied of the bulk of her defenders, as they rode to confront Mordred; Morgaine marched darker forces against the castle itself, against a handful of men-at-arms and Merlin... and the dark servitor of Merlin who had often been glimpsed scaling the castle's turrets at nights like a gargoyle come to life. An ape, some said; others knew better and whispered that the shape in the dark was a demon. And so it was-- Merlin had a half-brother, born in hell to fully demonic heritage while Merlin himself was born on earth. Belial's other ''son, Etrigan by name. Their shared lineage had given Merlin the power to call Etrigan to earth and bind him to his service, but even the demon's harnessed rage and Merlin's sorcery could not stand against the powers Morgaine was sending against the deserted castle. The time of Arthur's shining reign was over; the tides were turning, and Merlin knew that castle and king would both fall. He would retreat from the world and bide his time, but what to do with Etrigan? How to keep him from running roughshod over the earth, without his brother to control him? The answer presented itself in the form of Iason. Stricken by remorse, the disgraced knight sought out his wise brother and begged to be of use, begged a quest or task by which he might redeem his name and yet serve Arthur. Merlin offered him the opportunity he craved. As Blaise had sold worthless donkey's bones to gullible villagers and claimed they were the shinbones of saints, so Merlin dressed a punishment in the trappings of heroism. He promised that Iason would be able to hold and overpower the demon; that it was a task a Christian knight might do for his God and king both. Iason agreed to do whatever Merlin wanted. And thus was the prince of hell bound into a mortal form, their souls merged in fire by the world's greatest wizard. The bond shattered Iason's sanity. Etrigan was in sole control of the human's battle-tested body. Merlin had already moved beyond Etrigan's ability to find, but there were other targets at hand... those that would mean something to Merlin, and to this mortal whose body Etrigan now called an unwilling home. Iason left Camelot to Morgaine's devils, and rode to his own lands, a puppet of Etrigan's will. And once there, he took up his sword, and slew his wife and his two daughters. Thus began a rampage that lasted for weeks; few of the locals were any match for the skill of a trained knight, however crazed he might be. By the end of it, Blaise himself was among Iason's victims, and the region whispered in terror of the blood-drenched madman wandering the land, whom they began to call ''Jason of the Blood. Eventually, exhaustion overcame Etrigan's ability to keep the body on its feet. Jason regained some semblance of control over his body, collapsing from fatigue, injuries, and immeasurable grief and shock. It was a prelude of all that was to come, in the long long years ahead. Merlin was gone; his own father dead, and Arthur dead as well. Jason sought the nearest bastion of the Christian faith and threw himself on the mercy of the monks, begging them to slay him if they couldn't free him from the evil that whispered in his mind. Through trial and error he learned that the church could do nothing for him, and that even death offered no permanent release-- he could be slain, but would return to life only to find that the dark creature inside him had committed more slaughter in his absence. It was years before Jason's psyche recovered, if becoming numbed-beyond-feeling to the horrors that Etrigan perpetrated could be considered a 'recovery'. For his part, Etrigan grew bored with the monotony of simply using Jason's body for vile deeds, and engaged in such slaughters less often. It was also dull to have a gibbering wreck for a host, so Etrigan began to selectively toy with Jason's memories, seeking a spiteful balance: he wanted a host who was at least functional, but at the same time he despised the mortal who was now his prison, and wanted him to suffer with the knowledge of what he had done. (To this day, Jason's memories of his centuries with Etrigan are spotty, with gaps that span decades in some instances, but he has gotten the bulk of his memories back.) As time passed, Jason realized that he was not aging. The bond with Etrigan's immortal life force had made him immortal too-- at best, a mixed blessing, as an existence with Etrigan was, well, hell. As a boy, he had gotten a tutoring in the rudiments of magic, but been at best a mediocre student even without Merlin to compete against. But now? Jason had a motivation like none other to master the arcane arts, hoping that in doing so he would find the spell to reverse the bond Merlin had forged, and banish Etrigan back to hell. Jason Blood, as he was being called, threw himself into study of the occult with a grim intensity. In the fifteen-hundred years since he was bound to Etrigan, Jason has yet to find the cure he sought, although he has amassed both a material fortune, an impressive collection of spellbooks and artifacts, and a reputation as a renowned demonologist and magician. The centuries have been tumultous-- Jason has traveled the world like a boat blown before a storm. He sacked Jerusalem at the head of the Crusaders; sailed on the Santa Maria ''with Columbus; visited China before Marco Polo. He has been a knight and a merchant, a pirate and a soldier... at some point in his long and bloody history he's tried his hand at them all. On rare occasion, he's even managed to be a good man. In the modern era, Jason Blood lives in Gotham City-- home of Batman and other costumed freaks. He and Gotham's protector have an uneasy relationship, one of mingled parts respect and wariness, disdain for each other's methods, and territorial wankery. Still, Jason Blood is an unparalleled expert on demons and the occult and Batman has found himself in need of Blood's talents-- and, at times, of Etrigan's-- on more occasions than he likes. Nor is Batman the only hero who has run into Etrigan a time or two, or been the recipient of his dubious 'help'. The last half-a-century has been a tumultous time for Blood and for his demon. Their bond has at times been lifted, but always restored. Etrigan has schemed and plotted, but the centuries of study and internal warfare and study have turned Jason's will to iron-- he can master his demon now, at times, although they still struggle for dominance. 'In Taxon' Text text text POWERS AND ABILITIES More information here! If you want to separate a large text into separate parts, like a character's history, you can: 'Jason Blood' Use subsections! Like one for canon history... 'Etrigan''' And one you can update with information about your character in Taxon. RELATIONSHIPS You can also do a 'relationships' section, to make a handy link to other characters' pages that have a relationship of some kind with your character. It's easiest to do this with a list: *Best Friend *Enemy *Love Interest *Acquaintance Category:Characters Category:Immortals Category:DC Comics